News TalkTalk loses 101,000 customers following data breach

If they've not gone bust, they won't learn a damn thing.
Even a hit to their bottom line doesn't seem to count for much nowadays.

 

I'm leaving them this coming friday, switching to the 200Mb Virgin Media service.

Not leaving them because of the data cock up but because of my supposedly guaranteed minimum 'Fibre Large' speed of 45Mbit has only been running at less than 20Mbit for the last 6wks.

Gave them plenty of time and chances to sort it out which they've failed to do, so decided to give someone else a chance.

Not really expecting too much from VM though TBH, I've come to the conclusion that it is virtually impossible to get a fast internet connection in this country that isn't playing up for at least 6mths out of every 12.

 

Well, I live in a fairly rural area, 13-15 miles outside Glasgow. I get the advertised 100mb that I signed up to and have had no major dropouts (2hrs+) in the entire time I've been with Virgin (going on 4 years now).
Before that it was BT who were $hit, and before that it was Talktalk who were beyond $hit.

As an aside, do we know what percentage of their userbase that 101,000 accounts for?

 

Their free upgrade was a bit sh*t tbh. Stating 'no strings attached' and then charging them if you miss the engineer slot, and not having an automatic cut off for the sim card don't constitute as no strings in my mind.

 

Talking to someone about ISP security has lead me to believe all the major ISPs are just as bad when it comes to security, it seems very low down on the list of priorities and maybe needs better regulation to force them to take the security of customers details seriously.

 

Well of course they are all as bad. Why would a company give a flying fanny about doing things for customers that they can't sell or market as feature. Why would the admins give a flying fanny about the company they work for when it's just a job and they could go work somewhere else and why on earth would the share holders care when TalkTalk can pull such a blunder and still increase their dividends. There is no incentive anywhere to give any amount of shits.

 

It took the major browsers to stop supporting SHA-1 before VM bothered upgrading their systems, it shouldn't be down to the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla to force ISPs into doing the right thing.

 

The idea that businesses can make themselves or each other socially responsible is fundamentally flawed. The guise of social responsibility is only waved around as part of branding and PR initiatives which ultimately fall under business agendas to maintain or improve their ability to operate.

It would be reasonable to assume that such regulation would fall under a governments remit, but between business lobbying /donations to political entities, mass collection of public data, and politicians / law makers with 0 technolgical understanding its clear governments give about as much of a toss as the businesses do.

Its time to move to a new planet.

 

Well yeah, until businesses can be prosecuted liberally for something amounting to gross negligence (i.e. This situation, the recent recession, everything Monsanto does), then nothing will change.

Also, how does a company with such a public media bashing still retain ~4.3 million customers? Are the general public that ignorant and bone idle that they just can't be bothered to do something about their personal details being (potentially) made publically available?

 

I think it is because most of the major ISPs have such a poor reputation for customer service that most customers see little incentive to move.

 

+1 on this.

And if like us (although I've moved everything over to gmail now) you use the included email service, it becomes a right ball ache to change over all your email addresses on various accounts etc.


But also, yes, I would imagine a huge percentage of those 4.3 million customers are 'that ignorant', I wouldn't even be surprised if a large portion of them don't even know the attack happened.

 

I think it is down to a problem that is fundamental to all software. It's completely intangible and so requires an ability to think about it in an abstracted manner. People can't do that very well.

If someone walked into talk talk and removed filing cabinet upon filing cabinet of customer information and the media can show things like the door the kid walked in through and how poorly guarded that door was and an example of a piece of paper that was contained within the filing cabinets there would probably be outrage.

In reality its software so it doesn't exist, no one can relate to it and so it's not a real problem.